How to find plays to read for free online
Want to read more plays but can’t afford to buy them all? Here’s how to find playtexts for free online!
One of the best ways to learn about playwriting is to read plays — lots of them.
You get to see how the playwright has structured the play, how they’ve laid out their dialogue on the page, what they’ve chosen to include in their stage directions and how they’ve written them, and just how much freedom the cast and creative team might have when bringing the script to life on stage.
But plays can be expensive to buy. As much as I would like to, I can’t afford to purchase the physical, beautifully published playtext of every play I want to read. And I just wouldn’t have room in my space to keep them all.
I decided to save space and money — and trees — by finding and reading plays online for free.
Not all plays are freely available online — you’re unlikely to find recently published playtexts of new productions, for example. However, a vast majority of plays are easily accessible online. Here’s how to find them…
Google search with ‘PDF’
Perhaps the most obvious way of finding playtexts online is to Google search the title of the play followed by the word ‘PDF’ — this method is most successful when the play you’re looking for is well known and/or widely studied.
Plays such as The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Simon Stephens, DNA by Dennis Kelley, Blood Brothers by Willy Russell and An Inspector Calls by J. B. Priestley are available this way — they’re all set texts for GCSE English Literature.
Searching for other well known plays such as Happy Days by Samuel Beckett and All My Sons or Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller will also return PDFs of varying quality — a good place to start if you’re looking for a taster of the works of some of our best known playwrights.
Sometimes, googling the name of the playwright whose work you want to read followed by ‘PDF’ can work too — try searching ‘Simon Stephens PDF’ for example!
Shakespeare plays
Another good place to start is the works of Shakespeare. Sites such as The Complete Works of William Shakespeare and Open Source Shakespeare have all of Shakespeare’s plays in an easily readable, searchable and copy-pasteable format.
My favourite thing about these sites is that you can view the scenes individually if you want to, making it easy to find your place in the text or dip in and out of a play — much more accessible and less daunting than my tiny print, thin paper, brick-sized hardback copy!
Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg is an online library of free eBooks, including playtexts. The navigation of the site isn’t the easiest — but if you know the name of the play or playwright you’re looking for, it’s worth checking to see if it’s on there.
The collection is made up of works which are now out of copyright, which includes the plays of William Shakespeare, Henrik Ibsen, Anton Chekhov, Bernard Shaw, Sophocles and Oscar Wilde among others.
Drama Online
Drama Online has an online library of playtexts. If you’re a student studying any subject at university, you access all of them for free by logging in via your institution. Alternatively, if you have a library card, you can log in with your library card number.
Access to Drama Online also means you’ll be able to watch recordings of live theatre, including the full National Theatre Collection.
BBC Writersroom
BBC Writersroom’s Script Library doesn’t have playtexts specifically, but it does have a wide range of TV, radio and film scripts — across drama and comedy — including Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Killing Eve scripts, Sally Wainwright’s scripts for Gentleman Jack, and many Doctor Who and Sherlock episodes.
Particularly useful for playwriting is the radio drama section — there you’ll find radio plays written by playwrights such as Dawn King, Winsome Pinnock and Dennis Kelly.
Radio play scripts are a really useful resource to tap into — whether you’re considering writing for radio or just looking to further your understanding of how you can use sound in your plays, definitely check them out!
The perfect balance?
In terms of reading plays, the perfect balance for me has been a mix of finding playtexts online using the methods I’ve listed here and finding print ones at discounted prices in charity shops.
As a starting point, especially if you’re new to playwriting, I’d recommend checking out plays for free online. But there’s definitely something to be said for buying playtexts and having a physical copy to yourself too — personally, I like to buy the ones I either really want to read but can’t find anywhere else, or the ones I’ve already read but want to keep forever.
Sometimes, though, I like to discover something new by picking up a play from Oxfam Books that I hadn’t heard of before or wasn’t necessarily looking to read — I’ll be writing about my favourite Oxfam discoveries soon!
Thanks for reading! Please get in touch if you’re interested in anything I do — you can find me at
here on Substack or on Instagram @kayleigh.hinsley! If you’re a writer with a script you’d like feedback on, you can also access my script reading service here, which I run on a pay-what-you-can basis!